Two decades after its creation, Philip Glass' "La Belle et la Bête" ("Beauty and the Beast") retains its power to amaze and enchant an audience. This genre-spanning adaptation of the classic Jean Cocteau film, which on Thursday night opened San Francisco Performances' weekend-long celebration of the composer's 75th birthday, is yet more evidence of Glass' ability to spin beauty in rare and unexpected ways.

Perhaps the work's greatest coup is the audacity of the conception itself. Glass took Cocteau's redolent cinematic fairy tale from 1946 - a near-perfect blend of fantasy, humor and shadowy erotic symbolism - and tossed out the soundtrack, including music by French composer Georges Auric. In its place Glass created a new, through-composed vocal work, setting the film's dialogue operatically for live performers.

The result is a wondrous hybrid, a live-action cinematic opera that takes its pacing and shape from the original film but its theatrical immediacy from the presence of performers on the stage. There's nothing else quite like it.

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Glass' score is, in a way, similarly cross-bred. It combines many ideas out of his familiar stylistic toolkit - the moody minor-key arpeggios, the two-against-three rhythms, the gleaming woodwind and synthesizer sonorities of the Philip Glass Ensemble - with what was then a newly free approach to vocal writing, prompted by the irregular rhythms of the French texts he had to set.

Since 1994, much of Glass' operatic work has expanded along these lines, but at the time, his command of characterization and dramatic nuance was rather less assured. Cocteau's vividly sketched cast of characters - the noble and self-reflective Belle, her ardent but feckless suitor, Avenant, and especially the tormented Beast, a Byronic hero with facial hair and eerily smoking paws - rarely find musical expression in Glass' vocal writing.

But the instrumental set pieces in "La Belle" are magnificently apt. Glass could have been born to compose the music for Belle's father's nocturnal ride through a fogbound forest, or for the insinuating shots of the Beast's enchanted castle, populated by watchful gargoyles and candelabras held by disembodied arms. The comic scenes, particularly those featuring Belle's vain and wicked sisters, are also splendidly done.

Thursday's performance at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts offered a potent and sensitive rendition of the piece. Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn was especially fine as Belle, singing with bright tone and tender phrasing; the other roles were capably sung by baritone Gregory Purnhagen, soprano Marie Mascari and baritone Peter Stewart. Michael Riesman conducted, with a deft combination of freedom and faithfulness to the film.

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